POLL | Brent Batten: Spill or no spill, we need to drill

A favorite pastime of the left of late is to gleefully observe that they're not hearing much from the "drill baby, drill" crowd these days.

I'm not sure if I can be counted as a member of the "drill baby, drill," crowd, having never used the term prior to the latter part of the previous sentence.

The repetition of "drill" seems unnecessary and the superfluous "baby" is not part of my syntactic repertoire. I'm more of a "man" or "dude" person.

But I have been a part of the "drill" crowd.

So what do I say now that the Deepwater Horizon disaster has pumped untold millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, fouled marshes and fisheries along the coast, put tar balls on Florida beaches and threatened the state's tourism industry?

Drill.

As much as we may not want to admit it, our way of life is dependent on oil. It is our largest source of energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal and natural gas combined supply roughly the same amount of power as do oil and its by-products, such as gasoline. Nuclear supplies about one-fifth as much. Wind and solar combined amount to one one-hundreth.

All of the angry rhetoric and righteous indignation directed toward British Petroleum and the oil industry in general aren't going to change that anytime soon.

While the Deepwater Horizon disaster may make Americans re-examine their addiction to oil and even to embrace technologies to break it, the massive oil-reliant infrastructure of our society cannot be switched out overnight. In the short, and even mid-term, we're still going to need oil — lots of oil.

We have two ways to get it. We can buy it from other countries or we can produce it here at home.

The volume of oil we need mandates that we will do some of both. But when you consider that oil-exporting countries are going to place their own interests over ours and that a significant number of them are hostile to us to one degree or another, it would be foolish to abandon offshore domestic oil production as a response to the Deepwater Horizon debacle.

A moratorium on deep water exploratory wells like the one that exploded April 20 killing 11 BP workers until the causes of the accident are understood and better contingency plans are in place makes sense.

The ill-conceived notion of bringing wells as close as three miles to Florida's beaches to boost state revenue is effectively dead as a result of the worst-case scenario playing out 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Good riddance.

But to carry the crusade against offshore drilling beyond that is unwise. Gulf production accounts for about 25 percent of America's domestic oil, according to the Mineral Management Service. The Gulf yields more oil than Texas or Alaska.

Tens of thousands of people work in the industry and thousands more rely on the income of oil workers to fuel local economies. Answering one calamity, the devastation to fishing, tourism and the ecosystem, with another, a death sentence for the offshore oil industry, is not a formula for recovery.

When everyone who believes Gulf oil production should cease because of the Deepwater Horizon accident starts riding a bike to work and running their air conditioners with wind mills, I'll reexamine my position.